You may have already identified those employees that are little nuts – but have you found that you or your managers might be contributing to their insanity?  This mini-series has focused on the 4 primary ways that managers can unwittiningly drain work of its meaning.  In Harvard Business Review, researchers Amabile and Kramer look at how to motivate and support their employees by valuing their work.  During the study they reviewed the diary entries of over 200 creative project team workers to see what negative actions managers take that affect their morale.

This final way is again a result of poor communication.  Most of our organizations have a separate division for customer service and sales, which makes good sense.  Serving and analyzing the needs of our customers requires very specific skill sets and training.  However, there is often a lack of communication between customer points of contact and other areas of the organization supplying the product.

One diary entry reported deep frustration and low motivation when the author found out that there is a strong possibility that the project may not be going forward, due to a shift in the client’s agenda.  Therefore, there is a strong possibility that all the time and effort put into the project was a waste of our time.

Have you established a strong communication process across the departments in your organization?  Do you have systems in place to mitigate client agenda changes and redundant employee efforts?  These are all areas to examine as you consider employee morale and systems process efforts.  We at Brighter Strategies specialize in process development and evaluation – look for our online resources or just give us a call, we are always happy to help.

We will continue looking at employee morale and how to boost innovation work in our next blog.